74 A SCIENTIFIC APPROACH 



can no more see again than a man can recall his infancy, I 

 should expect to be a witness of the evolution of living proto- 

 plasm from not living matter. I should expect to see it appear 

 under forms of great simplicity, endowed, like existing Fungi, 

 with the power of determining the formation of new protoplasm 

 from such matters as ammonium carbonates, oxalates and tar- 

 trates, alkaline and earthy phosphates, and water, without the 

 aid of light. 



In just the same way Tyndall, in his address of 1874,^ 

 discussed the theory that life originated from lifeless matter. 

 From that time to the present, there have been unceasing 

 efforts to find a scientific solution to the problem of the 

 origin of life, regarding it as an occurrence which could be 

 interpreted on a materialistic basis. This important and 

 extremely difficult task has required, and still requires, not 

 simply an explanation of these wonderful occurrences in 

 time past but also verification of the correctness of such an 

 explanation. 



For nearly a century now these efforts have proceeded 

 according to two clearly distinct principles. First, the meta- 

 physical principle, according to which living things were 

 suddenly formed under some special conditions, separating 

 themselves from a lifeless medium in the same way as crystals 

 separate themselves from their mother liquors. Secondly, 

 the evolutionary principle, which considers the origin of life 

 in relation to the general development of matter and sees the 

 emergence of the first organisms as a definite stage in this 

 development. 



The evolutionary principle, as it relates to our problem, 

 was first formulated by Lamarck at the beginning of the 

 nineteenth century. Lamarck's^ well-known theory of the 

 evolution of organic nature, which was based on the ideas 

 of the French encyclopaedists,* enjoys a wide and well- 

 merited popularity. His ideas about the development of life 

 are, however, less well known. They are to be found in a 

 work written in 1820 under the title Systeme analytique des 

 connaissances positives de I'homme restreintes a celles qui 

 previennent de V observation.^ Here Lamarck described the 

 origin of living things from lifeless material as a process of 

 gradual development of matter. On this basis Lamarck 



